The Aunt's Story (22 page)

‘Alyosha Sergei, you will put on your coat,' Theodora said.

Because, she remembered, it is this way that you deal with a Sokolnikov, with a touch of brass.

‘But, Ludmilla,' said the General, and his lips had begun to take a dubious shape, ‘do you intend to destroy me?'

His thighs cried, for the aching evenings in which horses pawed under the full plane trees, and the patent leather marked time.

‘You will put on your coat, Alyosha Sergei,' said Theodora's voice, yellowed by long proximity to conscience. ‘You will take me for a walk. You will point out objects of local interest.'

The General's chair began to squeak.

‘But there is never anything to see,' he said. ‘Anywhere. The meat is all inside the shell.'

She heard his voice farther, complaining but dutiful, fretting what had been the corner of the almost fluid hotel. Forms were flowing into other moulds. As the light withdrew, Theodora felt that she also had ebbed by several hours.

‘Well, Katina,' she said in the accents of an aunt, ‘you have found your cat.'

‘My Aunt Smaragda, my aunt in Athens, once had a white
kitten, a white kitten with a black tail. A very
charming
kitten,' Katina said.

She used the word timidly, because it was one she had picked up from an older woman, and it was not yet her own. It belonged to the old women who practise social intercourse. As a word it was stale and dusty in her mouth.

‘Are you a spinster?' Katina Pavlou asked.

‘That is how I am described,' said Theodora Goodman.

‘So is my Aunt Smaragda who lives alone in Athens. She had an unfortunate love affair in Smyrna with somebody who went away.'

The shells on the shores of Asia Minor echoed faintly the misfortune of Aunt Smaragda. The air of the
jardin exotique
was full of sad sounds of no distinguishable origin.

‘But so far!' said Theodora. ‘You make it sound so far.'

‘That is something we are not told,' Katina Pavlou said.

And now her voice, white, furred, insinuated itself along the skin. It curled in the saucers of the body like a small white cat.

‘I would like to fall in love,' said Katina Pavlou. ‘More fortunately, of course. I would like that best of all.'

In the garden of the Athenian aunt, when it was night, when the small white charming cat elongated itself against the lilacs, even marble lost its substance, flowed, and murmured with its lilac throat. The Athenian garden of the Pavlou aunt was thick with white lilac and black trees.

‘Oh, I would like to fall in love,' Katina Pavlou said. ‘I would like to marry a scientist, and sail with him up the Congo, and do something historical. But Mamma says I shall make a successful match. They are giving me so much to make it with. I shall not tell you how much, because I believe the British consider it vulgar to talk about such things.'

Under the white lilacs and the black trees in the garden of the Athenian aunt, people sat at an iron table discussing Balkan affairs and marriage. Theodora put up her hand to disentangle the big velvety moth whose feet had caught in her hair.

‘Say something,' sighed Katina Pavlou.

‘I was thinking of Aunt Smaragda who lives alone in Athens,' Theodora sai
.

‘Oh, Aunt Smaragda has the Great Idea. She says that as
Greeks are born to die, then they can die best on the road to Constantinople. She prays for Byzantium. She prays for the day when the saints will blaze with gold.'

Heavy with gold and silver, the icon faces of many aunts smouldered with Ideas. Theodora remembered that she had forgotten to buy aspirin.

‘Mamma says it is fortunate that Aunt Smaragda has her Great Idea. Otherwise she'd be buried alone. That is why Mamma married Papa, so she says, so as not to be buried alone. Papa was a colonel once. Now they live in hotels. They follow the season, and Papa plays bridge.'

So that waiting with the child for the door to announce
le lever de Madame Pavlou
, Theodora knew pretty well what to expect.

‘
Tes cheveux
,
chérie
,
sont à faire rire
,' said the dressing-table voice, smoothing a wrinkle off its own forehead.

Powder had scattered on the imitation buhl at which Europa's Bull, the Colonel with the black eyelids and the moustache, considered the ace of hearts.

‘Do you know what, Mamma?' Katina said. ‘The waiter at the third table on the left showed me how to squeeze an egg into a bottle.'

The Colonel hummed Meyerbeer and mopped the seltzer off the ace of hearts.

‘That may be,' said the phoenix-mouth, flaming for the fifty-seven-thousandth time. ‘But normal eggs do not do peculiar things. You are here to learn from Miss Goodman that they are preferable
à la coque
,
en cocotte
, or beaten into an omelette. At Easter they are also dyed, and make a quaint and pretty present when handed by a young girl.'

‘Yes, Mamma,' Katina said.

The Colonel's moustache played Meyerbeer as convincingly as a French horn.

‘
C'est ridicule de croire
,' said the voice of the astringent lotion, ‘
qu'on s' amusera à Deauville ou à Aix
.'

‘
Mais alors
,' said the Colonel, throwing down the card preparatory to picking it up again. ‘
Allons à Baden Baden
.'

It was as logical, of course, as the revolving doors of all large hotels. But it left Katina Pavlou sitting with the kitten in her
lap. The kitten's nose, smudged with first blood, sniffed at some fresh dubiousness in a revised universe.

‘You are not going?' said Katina Pavlou to Theodora.

She spoke now with less conviction, and her body assumed the immobility of the leaves of the
jardin exotique
, which, from association, she had begun to imitate.

‘You will not leave me,' Katina said.

‘No,' said Theodora.

It was a cold stone, which she would have warmed if it had been possible, but her hands were as watery as promises.

‘No,' her voice said, speaking the code language of human intercourse.

But even Katina Pavlou had begun to know that people are generally forced to do the opposite of what they say. She knew that the weather had changed, and that a wind which had started up from the sea was threading the grey paths. You could also hear the stairs protest beneath Sokolnikov.

‘Ludmilla,' he called, ‘are you coming?'

So Katina Pavlou took the fact for granted.

‘I suppose I shall go and darn my stockings,' she said. ‘Or I shall write a reply to a letter, in reply to a reply.'

And as it was more or less arranged, Theodora went towards the General's voice.

‘Let us make this walk that will give no pleasure to anyone,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Let us at least explore your perversity.'

In the hall he was huge, in his overcoat and scarves, and a flapped fur cap that he had fastened over his ears.

‘So that you will have to shout,' he said, ‘and will think twice for the truth of what you say.'

Remembering Katina Pavlou, Theodora did not reply.

They began to walk along the street, along the asphalt promenade, on one side of which, protected by brick and stucco, glass and iron, life was being led. But the other side, the sea side, flowed. They had put an iron railing between the asphalt and the sea. But this did not deter any latent desire. It was as much a protection as theory is from fact. This was the evening air damply stroking, wind fingering the bones, the opening and closing of violet and black on its oyster-bellied self, the sound of
distance which is closer than thought. The iron railing spindled and dwindled in the evening landscape. Sometimes faces looked through the openings in brick and stucco, from their pursuits behind glass, or under the blunt planes, or in the elaborate bandstand, looked out to wonder at the extent of their own charade.

But only to wonder at, Theodora Goodman noticed. The most one can expect from the led life is for it to be lit occasionally by a flash of wonder, which does not bear questioning, it is its own light.

‘You see, Ludmilla,' said Alyosha Sergei, ‘it is the same as anywhere else, the same. In the window above the
quincaillerie
there is a woman who will have a child in December. I have watched her adding it up. When the post-office clerk from Marseille, who has seen his future in a mirror, cuts his throat in the bathroom of his wife's father, who has invited him for fifteen days to tell him his faults, they will stitch silver tears on
crêpe
and pretend that it was insanity, so that they can give him a tombstone and curse his grave.'

‘But it will not affect the calendar of the woman who is having a child in December,' said Theodora Goodman.

‘No,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Unfortunately, no. She will have her child, some eventually spotty boy, who will hate algebra, and marry the daughter of Madame Le Bœuf, and be killed in a war. This Madame Le Bœuf, who is at the moment wrapping a stiff fish in a sheet of the
Petit Marseillais
for the curé's supper, is chiefly obsessed by eternity. She would like to know that her soul will be wrapped stiffly in a sheet of paper and not expected to swim.'

‘Through eternity,' added Theodora Goodman.

‘Alas,' sighed Sokolnikov.

But Theodora did not reject the word. It flowed, violet, and black, and momentarily oyster-bellied through the evening landscape, fingering the faces of the houses. Soon the sea would merge with the houses, and the almost empty asphalt promenade, and the dissolving lavender hills behind the town. So that there was no break in the continuity of being. The landscape was a state of interminable being, hope and despair devouring and disgorging endlessly, and the faces, whether Katina Pavlou, or
Sokolnikov, or Mrs Rapallo, or Wetherby, only slightly different aspects of the same state.

‘How beautiful it all is,' said Theodora Goodman as she watched the motion of the lavender hills.

She could breathe the soft light. She could touch the morning, already flowering heliotrope and pink, through which the leather men dragged brown nets bellying with luminous fish.

‘Beautiful!' cried the General, grinding his ferrule on the asphalt. ‘It is as beautiful as a Sunday newspaper. It is an enormous crime.'

He spoke to the air, which, in its evening detachment, remained serene.

‘You remind me of my ex-wife Edith, of whom I have not yet spoken,' the General said. ‘She made many such remarks, without thinking. Frequently she said: You'll be the death of me. But my wife Edith is still alive. A cheeky, arrogant woman. A retired cook. I married her for her income, and for years ate mince. Yes,' sighed the General. ‘In Kensington. Ah, Ludmilla, why is suffering so intensely personal?'

He paused, but not for an answer, more as if resting on the stairs to feel his heart. He looked back to accuse, Theodora saw, the figure of Edith, who stood deliberately buttoning her brown kid gloves.

‘If that is a dirty look, you can save it,' Edith said. ‘Let me tell you from the start, Alyosha Sergei, all you suffer from is inflation. Wind, wind, wind, whatever the fancy name. Now I am going out to chapel. If you're hungry, there's mutton in the larder, and a prune shape.'

‘She was a practical but insensitive creature,' the General said. ‘I hated her extravagantly. She slammed doors. Her bust was decorated with a cairngorm, which she inherited with her fortune and many hideous objects in bronze from Mrs Arbuthnot, an old lady whom she tyrannized. Edith was most herself when dusting bronze. She had a clock in the shape of the Houses of Parliament that she loved with passion. Her week begun and ended with the winding of her clock, which was protected by a glass dome. You should have seen, Ludmilla, the love and agility with which she removed the dome, as if she were baring her own bronze soul. The ritual was timed to take place just before
the stroke of one. Afterwards, listening to her clock, in the middle of Sunday, on Mrs Arbuthnot's Wilton carpet, Edith shone.'

Edith also snorted. Theodora saw that she had been poured right up to the lips of her kid gloves. Her cairngorm eye was fringed with pebbles, slate, and fawn, that never closed.

‘What you needed was a statue, Sokolnikov. To be married to a statue,' Edith said. ‘But a statue with 'oles for eyes, that would cry and cry and cry. Never flesh and blood, and roast mutton on Sundays. Oh, no, no! Nor for Sokolnikov!'

Theodora heard the General swell.

‘You are an insolent woman, Edith,' he said. ‘I don't wonder Mrs Arbuthnot died.'

‘She was an asthmatic subject,' said Edith. ‘In the end it got at 'er heart. I 'ave it in writing, Alyosha Sergei, if you are suggesting, if you are suggesting.'

‘I am not suggesting that you used a knife.'

‘You are mad, mad, mad!' shouted Edith, who was pouring her gloves together in the hall.